So I recently created the Senate Vote Comparison tool to help bring another form of transparency to us and our politicians. Within the site you can see a list of the current matters they have voted on, and you simply cast your vote for the matter. Then, on the results page it provides a list of all the senators and your percent match to them on the voting. You can also click on a Senator and see specifically on which items you do and don’t agree, as well as any deal-breaker issues (matters you want highlighted for a match or mismatch). You can also click on the bills and see the full vote tally for that matter as well as update your vote or indicate a deal-breaker issue.

This was all created using Cursor powered by Claude 3.7, and it scrapes the XML data from the senate.gov website. Ultimately this would be better with an api key as the scraping has been problematic and the biggest hurdle in this project but the keys I wanted (like ProPublica) were not available or did not have the data parsed in a way that worked well for this project (like congress.gov). I also wanted users to be able to save their vote data but I do not want any unique or identifying information, so to save votes users create a passphrase using 3 random words like “goat battery carrot”, that they can then enter again when they come back to retrieve their vote data.

Check it out at forthepeople.ataary.com.